Coming of Age: Teaching and Learning Popular Music in Academia

The Long Revolution and Popular Music Education, or, Can Popular Music Education Change Society?

In this chapter, I consider some of the issues presented by the learning and teaching of popular music from a sociological perspective. As the title indicates, the main concern of the chapter will be with the relationship between popular music education and social change. It should be emphasized from the beginning, however, that I do not believe that popular music education is only useful in an instrumental sense—that is, to facilitate societal change. Indeed, I hold passionately to the belief that all young people have a right to participate in music education that allows them to engage with contemporary popular music for its own sake and its own intrinsic rewards. Alongside this belief is a commitment to social justice and working toward changing long-established and accelerating societal patterns of injustice and inequity. From these commitments emanates my interest in examining how one part of the sociological picture—in this case, the interactions of young people with popular music in education—might influence the bigger one, the behemoth we call society.

Sociology concerns “the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships; specifically: the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of organized groups of human beings” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). As a sociologist of music education, it follows that my work involves the study of music education in relation to society—its institutions and social relationships—and I have a particular interest in the study of popular music in these respects. The sociological approach is particularly useful in this regard in its provision of robust theoretical frameworks forming a series of lenses through which issues, events, actions, and interactions can be scrutinized. The same can be said of several other disciplinary perspectives, such as philosophy and psychology; however, one of the particular strengths of sociology is its foundations in the integration of insights from both its own field and other fields—something I have previously described as “a sociology of integration” (Wright, 2014b). For instance, the works of sociologists such as Bourdieu and Bernstein have variously combined thoughts of previous sociologists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber with those of philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Althusser, and Foucault; linguists such as Saussure; and psychologists such as Luria while adding their own unique insights to their fields. This makes the sociological perspective particularly capable of finely nuanced description and analysis of phenomena as multifaceted, socially situated, and constructed as popular music and music education.

This chapter is framed as a response to one of the big questions of sociologists of education throughout history; indeed, it has probably been asked by philosophers since the dawn of civilization, and it is the question asked by renowned critical pedagogue Michael Apple in the title of his 2013 book Can Education Change Society? The question is problematic on many levels, as Apple acknowledges. In a later article, he discusses this in the following way: “It is important to realize that education is a part of society. It is not something alien, something that stands outside. Indeed, it is a key set of institutions and a key set of social, economic, political, and personal relations” (Apple, 2015, p. 305). Furthermore, Apple continues to outline the role of schools as sites of labor relations stratified in terms of class, race, and gender. As sites of paid work, they are “integral parts of the economy,” increasingly subject to commodification and marketing (p. 306; emphasis in original). They have been sites of resistance to and reproduction of racial and other inequities. Moreover, they are key sites of identity production. Beyond these roles, schools also play a part in the definition and reproduction of legitimate knowledge, or as Apple asserts, “They are key mechanisms in determining what is socially valued as ‘legitimate knowledge’ and what is seen as merely ‘popular’” (p. 307). This is an important point I shall discuss in relation to sociological theory later in the chapter. Apple continues: “In their role in defining a large part of what is considered to be legitimate knowledge, they also participate in the process through which particular groups are granted status and which groups remain unrecognized or minimized” (p. 307). Yet despite these entanglements with society itself, Apple asserts that it is possible to answer the question of whether education can change society in the affirmative—so long as we look beyond only countering class-related economic inequity. He suggests that previous Marxist and neo-Marxist analysis has been limited by viewing change in this respect as the only change that matters. While crucial, this overlooks the potential of other changes that might be made possible through education. Apple suggests such transformation might occur through the interaction of various projects, originating from several different points of departure, all concerned with countering injustice that meet and coalesce in what Apple terms “decentred unities” (p. 302). In this sense, Apple suggests, they become important aspects of Williams’s (1961) Long Revolution, which we shall consider in more detail in the following sections, and in this sense, perhaps we can argue that education might change society.

A modification is required to Apple’s question to bring it more specifically into alignment with the topic of this chapter. Refining and slightly redirecting Apple’s original query, the question is rephrased to ask whether popular music education can change society.

Perhaps the first thing to be clarified is why social change is necessary. There is no doubt, in my opinion, that we live in an era of encroaching global capitalism and increasingly universal neoliberal governmental policies that give rise to ever increasing inequalities. As the distance between the rich and the poor continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important that society steps in to redress the balance in terms of support for those at the lower end of the economic scale, for whom necessities such as work, food, housing, and medical care are becoming less and less obtainable. Moreover, as Thomas Piketty (2014) has shown in his influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, this is a situation that will worsen unless radical societal intervention occurs. Analyzing data from more than twenty countries and dating back to the eighteenth century, Piketty has discovered many important economic and social patterns that lead to ever increasing inequity. Rooted in the fact that the rate of return on investment constantly outstrips that of economic growth, Piketty predicts that unless checked by political intervention, this pattern of economic inequity will continue and will produce extreme inequality and social unrest in the future. The situation, as we have seen only too clearly in the 2016 US presidential election campaign and election results, is further exacerbated in countries where the neoliberal agenda is in control and by policies gaining increasing popular support involving the demolition of social programs for the poor, causing rising hunger and homelessness (affecting an ever younger population); growing work, pension, and health care insecurity; and the recurrence of xenophobia, homophobia, racism, and violence toward minorities. There are serious problems with the current social organization in many countries, when viewed from the perspective of social justice. My own conceptualization of social justice follows that of Rawls (1971, 1999), expressed in his seminal work A Theory of Justice. Reisch (2002) suggests that, for Rawls, the justice of a system should be assessed “on how fundamental rights and duties are assigned and on the economic opportunities and social conditions in the various sectors of society” (p. 346; Rawls, 2001). Reisch (2002) goes on to state that Rawls’s self-termed maximin theory is founded on two principles:

1. “Each person has an equal right to the most extensive system of personal liberty compatible with a system of total liberty for all.”
2. “Social and economic inequality are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged in society and (b) attached to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.” (p. 346)

In addition to this, the concept of social justice operative in this chapter is underpinned by a belief in a robust link between social justice and social responsibility as expressed in a commitment to identifying and countering inequity, oppression, and domination wherever they occur throughout society.

For education, the effects of global neoliberalism have also failed to contribute to an educational system that encourages Bildung in its original sense. Bildung is a German word for education that nurtures autonomy and individuality and focuses on personal responsibility for constant development of the whole person, or a striving toward perfection, as Prange (2004, p. 503) describes. Instead of this, however, the educational trend appears to be an ever increasing concentration on employability and more rigidly defined pathways through education that lead to distinct career outcomes—an interpretation to which the term Bildung has interestingly, although erroneously, also been applied (Prange 2004). This comes at the expense of any underlying philosophy of Bildung in its original sense. Against a reminder of “the fact that liberty is at risk in ways that may be different, but which nevertheless require a constant reminder of what is lost when we [educators] are treated as mere functionaries of the status quo” (p. 509), Prange suggests that the remnant of the original notion of Bildung serves a useful function in considerations of education, as it “serves as the critical ferment, not so much by way of public protest, rather by its very existence as a living memory of our potential to give a meaning to what we do and experience” (p. 509).

British sociologist Basil Bernstein (1996, 2000) also identified risks inherent in education as the state moved to increasing control of the content of education, a move that, although beginning earlier than the 1970s in the United Kingdom, was given critical impetus by the Thatcher government. As decentralization of institutions’ management was accompanied by centralization of school monitoring and funding, the culture of education changed to one in which teachers and their professional and subject bodies had less autonomy and voice in the control and direction of education. This permitted increased state regulation of the content of education and a shift toward curricula Bernstein defines as embodying a generic performance mode. A simplified description of this mode is that it embodies a generic set of skills (e.g., transferable skills) that underlie a specific set of performances by students (i.e., completion of tasks in a range of subjects) by which achievement is judged. He further indicates that these generic modes and the tasks to which they give rise are instrumental to the economy and to the formation of the sort of flexible workforce the market foresees as necessary to future economic competitiveness. He considered this education policy to be based on a new conceptualization of “work” and “life”—one he named “short-termism” (p. 59). Short-termism projects an employment future that is in constant flux, where positions are constantly changing, shifting, and disappearing and where the individual can have no expectation of employment stability. All this is underpinned by a pedagogic concept Bernstein termed “trainability,” or the ability to train and retrain—to be able “to profit from continuous pedagogic re-formations and so cope with the new requirements of ‘work’ and ‘life’” (p. 59). Bernstein expressed his concerns that in this employment future, the actor was required to possess, without any means of developing, a capacity to create his or her own coherent identity, normally constructed “through relations which the identity enters into with other identities of reciprocal recognition, support, mutual legitimisation and finally through a negotiated collective purpose” (p. 59). In the trainable future, however, the actor would appear to be unlikely to find other identities to which to relate in these ways, and for these reasons, Bernstein thought the concept of trainability was “socially empty” (p. 59). The institutionalization of the concept of trainability was of concern to Bernstein, as it removed the imaginary world of “work” and “life” produced by the educational institution from the power relations that gave rise to it in real life, making it difficult to engage with it as a topic of debate and critique.

In this conception of education, the arts, including music, have become increasingly marginalized at both the compulsory schooling and the postsecondary education levels. They are marginalized or in some cases eliminated in favor of concentration in curriculum and in research funding on the somewhat repellently titled science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, deemed by governments to be most important to national competitiveness in the ever-changing global labor economy. The STEM acronym unfortunately conveys a conceptualization of knowledge as composed of a stem or core group of important or essential subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) that support the leaves, or nonessential/less important forms of knowledge, such as the arts and humanities.

Alongside this has been the reversal of progressive music curricula that were moving toward closer connections among the popular music–based sound worlds of adolescents outside the school and those experienced in their music education; now we see retrospective conservative curriculum models that resonate with the neoconservative government ideology of preserving tradition and reconfirming elite culture. Attendant upon such curricular reversals are likely to be the societal effects of their accompanying hegemonic actions, reinforcing middle-class, Eurocentric, elite culture and alienating vast numbers of students from music in schools. It is not surprising, therefore, that some music educators, particularly those advocating for the role of popular music in education with a keen eye to social justice, might feel that the time is ripe for a reconsideration of how popular music education might disrupt patterns of social exclusion and inequity.

As we have seen previously, however, Apple (2015) points out that there are problems if we conceptualize the question of education’s potential to effect social change in terms only of its impact on society’s economic relations. The same might be true of considerations of popular music education and its effect on social change, and we will be considering this in more detail in the following sections. Demanding of education that it, acting alone, change patterns of global, national, or local wealth distribution or decrease the distance between the rich and poor (Apple, 2013, 2015) is to miss other important aspects of the matter. So, perhaps, is gauging the effectiveness of education with respect to social change solely by its impact on these relations. Many scholars do just this, however, and Apple (2015) indicates as much in his paper in a volume of the journal Educational Theory. By these criteria, the only change that can be valued, or indeed looked for, says Apple, as a result of education will involve change in the economy and in class relations. Viewed in this way, the answer to the question of whether education can change society is, as agreed by many scholars, very emphatically, no!

It is perhaps a little peremptory, however, to dismiss the question quite so abruptly. Let us consider, as Apple does, if restricting our thinking to whether education can interrupt economic inequities and resulting class positions is rather one-dimensional in the interconnected and complex world of contemporary human societies and relationships. Apple suggests that such a reading fails to recognize the many complex interrelations of power at work in society and the ways in which they affect each other. Moreover, he says it prevents activists from forming important alliances—or “decentered unities,” as he terms them—that he says are “absolutely essential” to progress toward social justice (Apple, 2013, p. 31). He suggests that a more fruitful way to approach this question might be to ask, “Can schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can they do?” (Apple, 2015, p. 300).

In our case, the question then becomes, Can popular music education in schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can they do? This is obviously still an ambitious question and covers an enormous scope, encompassing many types of educational inequity and social injustice in each area of which there is a growing body of specialist literature to which one cannot possibly do justice in a single chapter. If, however, the reader will bear with me in pursuing this as an interesting macro-level question, it might offer a good five-thousand-foot-high perspective from which to examine issues of popular music education and society, and it is a variation on a question Apple believes has potential to yield useful answers.

I am equally aware that the field of what I am calling popular music is at least as vast—if not vaster—than that of social justice, as, for example, the Every Noise at Once project (McDonald, n.d.) is demonstrating. This mapping project is using big data obtained from the digital music service Spotify to attempt “an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1460 genres by Spotify” (McDonald, n.p.). Admittedly, not all 1,460 genres could be classified as popular music, but there is a predominant amount of popular music of very diverse nature and origin represented on this map. This leads to the admission that describing these musics by one term, “popular,” is also a vast oversimplification. As Middleton (2002, 1990) demonstrates, defining popular music is tremendously difficult: “The danger is of over-rigid definition, usually built on a failure to recognize the framework of assumptions underlying every distinction” (p. 7). Middleton, after rejecting six definitions of the term, advocates locating musical categories “topographically” (p. 7)—“on the ground on which the transformations are worked” (Hall, 1981, p. 228). This makes the Every Noise project, with its particular topographical mapping, appear particularly apposite. Again, it is hoped that you will bear with this oversimplification for the purposes of examining this very big-picture issue from a macroperspective.

What is Apple (2013) thinking of when he asks whether school can contribute to a more just society? First is a vision of “an education that responds to all of us, one that embodies a vision of the common good that says it needs constant criticism and revision to keep it alive” (p. 21).

It is here, I suggest, that the potential of popular music education to effect change toward a more just society lies. In concentrating on the socially reproductive effects of music education to perpetuate injustice, we might have overlooked the corresponding power and influence of culture to act as an agent of positive social change. Our hopes of successfully countering the effects of educational policies in contributing to a more unjust society might rest, as Apple (2013) suggests, precisely on acknowledging the socially transformative power of culture. And in this chapter, this is conceptualized in terms of the power of popular culture to effect individual growth and change in music education. I join with Apple in believing that cultural work is required alongside activism in the economy and politics and that this can contribute to social change, or what Raymond Williams (1961) termed “the long revolution.”

In his seminal work in the field of cultural studies, The Long Revolution, Williams (1961), credited as one of the founders of the sociology of culture, envisaged history since the industrial era as a series of revolutions—political, industrial, and cultural. These interlinked revolutions, he believed, engendered and would continue to engender gradually increasing popular control over society—hence the title, The Long Revolution: “It seems to me that we are living through a long revolution, which our best descriptions only in part interpret. It is a genuine revolution, transforming men and institutions; continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas” (p. x).

Williams observed, however, that this revolution was elusive to definition, uneven in action and occurring over such a protracted timespan that observation was problematic and the observer capable of becoming lost in complexity. First, Williams discussed the democratic revolution he identified occurring in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. He saw a rising determination of peoples to govern themselves and to own the political decision-making process. He also observed resistance to this movement by violence, deceit, and custom and suggested that, in terms of the maxim that people should have the right to govern themselves, the democratic revolution was at a very early stage.

Williams then turned to the industrial revolution, the aims of which, he asserted, had been almost universally accepted. He was uncertain what sort of correlation this bore to the development of democracy, both affording and constraining democratic rights and organization of the workforce.

Of particular interest to our concerns here is a third revolution Williams observed. He suggested that this was the most difficult of all to interpret—a cultural revolution. He described it thus: “We must see the aspiration to extend the active process of learning, with the skills of literacy and other advanced communication, to all people rather than to limited groups, as comparable in importance to the growth of democracy and the rise of scientific industry” (p. xi).

This revolution was also at a very early stage, however. Williams thought that we could not understand the process of change in society as a whole if we thought of these three revolutions separately. This longer quotation is essential to grasping the interrelationship of the three revolutions in Williams’s eyes:

The long revolution is, therefore, an ongoing popular quest for freedom advanced through interlinked social movements within which, importantly, the power of culture is acknowledged alongside politics and economics. It is here I believe that popular music education conceived of as both an educational and a social movement might have an important role to play in the journey toward a more just society.

In keeping with post-Weberian sociological thought, in which culture and society exist in complex interrelationship, with conditions in one affecting the other, Gramsci (1977) developed an explanation of the mechanism by which some of the less overt opposition to circumstances such as this ongoing popular quest took place. Gramsci (1977) asserted that bourgeois society was maintained by cultural as well as material constraints. He termed this cultural hegemony—the control of society’s intellectual values by cultural means. Through the imposition on society of the cultural preferences and values of the most powerful social group, reproduction of the status quo was assured. This involves a process whereby the views and tastes of the powerful become so ingrained that they are perceived and accepted as common sense. We can see this in postsecondary music education when the entrance requirements for further study in music are rigidly defined to include piano skills, understanding of Eurocentric art music theory, and harmony and performance skills on an orchestral instrument. For many years—although in some places, it is changing now—these gatekeepers were seen as inviolable, as common sense, as the “legitimate knowledge” with which any music education should be concerned. How could one even begin to access the music curriculum at university/conservatoire if one did not possess them? How could one contribute to the ensembles? Mere attempts to discuss broadening them or changing them to include other notations, histories, or theories beyond those of Eurocentric art music could bring faculty meetings to a halt, let alone suggesting candidates be allowed to audition on popular music instruments such as electric guitar. The common-sense understandings of those in elite positions in postsecondary music education were shaken to the core by such suggestions. This was not what music education was. The tastes, values, and corresponding skills and knowledge requisites of Eurocentric art music were deeply ingrained in many music academics’ worldviews. One might argue, therefore, that the long revolution has been even longer in influencing music education.

Although Williams observed these conjoint revolutions to be at a very early stage in 1961, he suggested that we could not possibly understand social development if we conceived of the three revolutions separately. For Williams (1961, pp. xi–xii), the profound cultural revolution occurring in the sixties formed a great part of the contemporary human experience. Williams, perhaps overly optimistic, saw even the industrial and democratic revolutions of the time as examples of humanity’s creative influence—humanity changing the world and insisting we all took power to direct our own lives. While some would question the extent to which industrial and democratic developments in the intervening years have lived up to Williams’s aspirations, it is interesting to consider events such as the Arab Spring and other recent popular interventions by the people of nation states in the affairs of their countries in this light.

Of course, the key question, asked by Williams in the sixties and still asked by scholars today, is whether the new opportunities thus created are used for human growth or as means of perpetuating existing systems of social organization with their attendant inequities—or indeed of generating new oppressive forms of social organization. Sadly, the aftermaths of some recent popular political interventions have demonstrated the ability of new forms of inequity to arise from moments of potential freedom. One wonders if the same might not be true or in danger of becoming true regarding the introduction of popular music into education. I shall come back to this point a little later in considering the thought of Richard Day.

I see very clear connections between Williams’s rather abstract theorization of the role of culture in society and the more concrete theoretical work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his theory of practice (1977 [1972]).

Bourdieu developed this theory as a means of understanding a puzzling situation he observed in his fieldwork in rural France and in Algiers. He could not find a satisfactory way to explain social practice—basically, behavior. In his fieldwork, he noticed that social actions such as marriage, for example, did not happen solely by obeying a set of rules agreed on by the society. Instead he observed that something more akin to a game of strategy appeared to be going on.

There are three main concepts around which Bourdieu’s theory is centered. The first is the concept of habitus, the second is that of field, and the third is that of capital. These concepts have independent meanings but function together. The first concept, habitus, is “a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and in particular a predisposition, tendency, propensity or inclination” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 214). It goes a long way toward explaining why we behave as we do. The habitus acts retrospectively in that it is formed by past experiences, of which those within the family are particularly important. It also has a forward-facing element, as it tends to direct how we act both now and in the future by keeping our behavior consistent with our previous experiences and the values they dictate.

This is not the totality of the actions and effects of habitus, however, because it also connects and reacts to another element, the field. This was how Bourdieu described the arena in which the action takes place. Returning to the game analogy, Bourdieu likened the field to a football field. The social field, like that in football, has designated positions for players and has limits formed by boundaries. It has rules that over time become implicit, but new players must learn the rules of the game.

The social game is also competitive—there are winners and losers. The actors use various strategies, such as marrying advantageously, to try to improve their position on the field. There are numerous fields, but the strongest one is the field of power. Position is determined by the third of Bourdieu’s concepts, capital. He discerned four types of capital: economic (wealth), cultural (knowledge of art, music, literature, etc.), social (networks and connections), and symbolic (a signifier of possession of one of the other forms, such as a degree or a mansion). The object of the game of life, therefore, was to accumulate these forms of capital.

Bourdieu summarized the relationship among the three concepts in the equation “[(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 101).

A way of expressing this in words is to say that our practice, or behavior, in everyday life is the product of the relationship between our dispositions (habitus) and our field position, which is in turn determined by how much capital we hold in the field.

Let’s see now how these concepts might work to help answer my question: Can popular music education in schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can it do? I would argue that one of the things popular music education might do to further a more just society would happen at the level of the individual habitus. When popular music is used as curriculum content in which learning and teaching embrace pedagogies and technologies authentic to the musics being studied, such as informal learning (Green, 2008), the results permit student autonomy and ownership of the learning and teaching process. I have suggested (Wright, 2015a, 2015b) that positive changes to habitus can occur. My colleagues Carol Beynon, Betty Anne Younker, Leslie Linton, and Jennifer Lang and I conducted a study over two academic years with two groups of Canadian elementary and secondary school students using the informal learning model that came to attention through Lucy Green’s work in the UK Musical Futures project (Wright et al., 2012; Wright, 2016). While this is not by any means the only pedagogical model that may be used to work with popular music in authentic pedagogical ways, it is one with which I had some experience and was interested to trial in Canada. In case there are readers who have not heard of informal learning, I recommend Lucy Green’s (2001, 2008, 2014) work.

The original form of this pedagogy was trialed with high school students in the United Kingdom as part of the Musical Futures project (https://www.musicalfutures.org). In this model, which Green (2014) has since called HELP (hear, listen, play), students choose music they want to learn and then do so by listening to recordings, copying, and teaching each other with support from their teacher as needed. Green (2014) has since expanded this pedagogy to incorporate strategies for use of a similar approach with students in individual instrumental lessons and has identified a pedagogy based on the model for large ensembles. Musical Futures projects based on this and other nonformal music teaching approaches are now thriving in many countries around the world.

In our Canadian pilot project, we found that students developed an increased sense of their own musical capabilities that confounded many of their previous expectations concerning what they would be able to achieve when presented with “real” pop music instruments. They also developed a different relationship with their teacher, who adopted the role of a coach and colearner, and they gained increasing confidence in themselves as both learners and teachers.

I have developed this thesis with illustrations from the data elsewhere (Wright, 2015a, 2015b, 2016). I have suggested that within the music learning situation, two distinct forms of cultural capital might be identified, which I have called “pedagogical” and “musical capital.” While I am not the first to use these terms, I believe I define them differently than previous authors. Livingstone (2007), in discussing pedagogical capital, describes it as “a quality that some students possess that enables them to arrive at the academic table better positioned to take advantage of our educational offerings.” Hayes (2011) describes pedagogic capital as an attribute of teacher practices. My interpretation of this term is based on a more agentic view of students as peer and self-teachers; it comprises “skills, knowledge, and understanding related to learning and teaching, moreover it concerns ownership of pedagogical decision-making” (Wright, 2015a, 2015b). I feel this is in keeping with the new sociology of childhood (Corsaro, 2011), which positions children as active agents involved in interpretation and reproduction of their own culture and ultimately their own childhoods. Coulson (2010) defines musical capital as “a useful shorthand for the interconnected cultural, social and symbolic assets that musicians acquire and turn to economic advantage in the music field” (p. 257). My own definition emphasizes emotions and perceptions rather than economic concerns and involves “skills in and knowledge and understanding of music affecting self-perceptions of musicality and musical potential” (Wright, 2015a, p. 95).

Just as Bourdieu plotted positions within the dominant field of power against axes of economic and cultural capital, I think we could plot positions within informal music learning classrooms against axes of musical and pedagogical capital. Many of the students involved in our informal learning project with popular music appeared to have made significant gains in their accumulation of these capitals; this altered individual habitus, and in turn, for a significant number, improved their position within the field of power. It is possible that if such pedagogic models were to be allowed to expand and challenge other dominating models of music education, the nature of common sense—or, in Apple’s terms, “legitimate knowledge”—in music education might gradually be changed. It is possible that such work using popular music and pedagogies such as informal learning in education might form part of the cultural element of Williams’s long revolution.

This might be said to be an example of counterhegemony, and it is along these lines that I have previously been thinking and writing. Gramsci (1977) argued that one of the tasks of a truly counterhegemonic education was not to throw out “elite knowledge” but to reconstruct its form and content so that it served genuinely progressive social needs (p. 42).

So far, so good. It is, however, fairly inescapable that previous efforts to engender larger social change through concerted efforts in education, and through music education, have not been universally successful. All too often, dominant societal forces manage to pervert the course of such movements from their original egalitarian goals. Canadian sociologist, political scientist, and activist Richard Day has suggested that our previous conception of counterhegemony might be the problem in this respect. He has proposed that we learn lessons from some of the newest social movements in approaching social change from what he calls the logic of affinity rather than that of hegemony. The next section of this chapter examines popular music education from this perspective. It is a challenging perspective but one that I think presents some ideas that might be useful to think with.

Day (2004) has noted that several contemporary social movements have departed from “the universalizing conception of social change that is characteristic of the logic of hegemony as it has developed within (post) Marxism and (neo) liberalism” (p. 717). Replacing this logic of hegemony is a logic of affinity drawn from anarchist social movements and accompanied, according to Day, by a focus on direct action (Day, 2004, p. 717). Such movements resist what he terms “the hegemony of hegemony” (p. 717). The hegemony of hegemony represents the understanding that change in society, or indeed order therein, requires “universalizing hierarchical forms” (p. 717). In other words, discriminatory macrostructures are essential to social order and social change.

It is here that we must be careful when we attempt to advance notions of popular music education as a means of social justice. There is, advises Day, the possibility that in attempting to counter hegemony by working for macro-level social change, radical new forms of activism or, in our case, of popular music education might become engulfed by dominant societal forces and turned into new “universalizing hierarchical forms” that lack the reformative power of their original initiative. Indeed, one does not have to think for too long to identify instances of this within music education. It is how neoliberalism works—engulfing and assimilating the radical and transforming it for its own ends.

Day continues to show, however, not only that creating new universal hierarchical forms might be unnecessary to achieving social change but also that some very important examples of twenty-first-century social activism (e.g., alternative media and antiglobalization) challenge this premise, following on from a long tradition of “affinity-based direct action” that he claims “has been submerged under (neo)liberal and (post)Marxist theory and practice” (p. 717).

He therefore discusses the potential of alternative nonhegemonic modes of action that might achieve radical social change. This he claims as a provisional definition of the logic of affinity: “It is that which always already undermines hegemony” (Day, 2004, p. 717).

And now we come back to culture, referring to Williams among other authors he acknowledges—those cultural scholars who have considered the possibilities of what Day calls “different logics of struggle” (p. 717). He acknowledges Williams (1973) and Hall (1983), who like Bourdieu, were insistent that “culture involves struggle, not only over meaning and identity, but also over political and economic power” (pp. 717–718).

He analyzes the successes of some of the newest social movements in achieving “a shift from a counter-hegemonic politics of demand to a non-hegemonic politics of the act” (p. 719). And it is here that I think we need to pay particular attention if we really intend popular music education to help us advance the long revolution—that is, to move toward a more just and inclusive society. Day describes as fantasy what he calls a previous politics of demand—one I believe we have engaged with in music education, myself included.

As Day opines, “Clearly, the fundamental fantasy of the politics of demand is that the currently hegemonic formation will recognize the validity of the claim presented to it, and respond in a way that produces an event of emancipation. Most of the time, however, it does not; instead it defers, dissuades or provides a partial solution to one problem that exacerbates several others” (p. 734). In other words, one expects that by representing the social injustice presented by, for example, hegemonic forms of music education to the dominant institution or group, they will realize the injustice being brought to their attention and accept the validity of the claim for change. This will subsequently respond, one hopes, in a manner that engenders a more just situation. However, this does not happen in most cases. Instead, procrastination occurs or counterarguments are presented or partial acquiescence is achieved that results in further problems. I would also add that there might appear to be prima facie gains made that result long term in engulfment, perversion, and submergence of previously radical ideas to the agenda of the dominant social form.

Day explains that a method more likely to achieve the desired ends is to “cross the fantasy” to an approach that does not “reproduce the conditions of its own emergence” (p. 733). This involves abandoning the anticipation of “a nondominating response from structures of domination”; it involves surprise both to oneself and to the structure “by inventing a response that precludes the necessity of the demand and thereby breaks out of the loop of the endless perpetuation of desire for emancipation” (p. 733). This involves an abandonment of attempts to change state power by advocating or activating for macro-level changes and instead giving increased recognition to the fact that the state itself is composed of interpersonal relationships and that it is at this level that fruitful change may take place.

Day provides examples of twenty-first-century social movements, such as the antiglobalization movement, that recognize the dangers of the logic of hegemony and respond to them by taking active measures at their deepest organizational and operational levels to prevent creating a new power around a hegemonic center; rather, activists seek to “challenge, disrupt and disorient the processes of global hegemony, to refuse, rather than rearticulate those forces that are tending towards the universalization of the liberal-capitalist ecumene” (p. 729).

They do so, according to Day, not by pursuing a sudden and complete departure from dominant structures but by embracing the strategy of structural renewal proposed by Landauer, among others, which embraces a willingness to coexist alongside one’s “enemies” while one puts in place alternatives that will render these enemies redundant. In this way, Day suggests that “it does not provide positive energy to existing structures and processes in the hope of their amelioration. Rather, it aims to reduce their efficacy and reach by rendering them redundant” (p. 739).

At this point, I should be clear that I am not proposing that forms of music education other than those involving popular music are the “enemy” or that they should be rendered redundant. What I am in favor of eliminating, however, are elitist hegemonic attitudes and practices that reify musics, thereby placing Western art music and its attendant skills, knowledges, and understandings in a position of dominance and excluding so many young people from a rewarding engagement and conceivable future in music education. It is these attitudes and practices that I wish to see become redundant.

What might movements based on the logic of affinity look like in popular music education? How might the long revolution, the ongoing popular quest for freedom, be played out in twenty-first-century popular music education contexts? What might these new forms of popular music education look like? Some initial guiding thoughts inspired by Day are that they will do the following:

• Deliberately refute the “logic of hegemony” by protecting themselves from developing universalizing power centers that position themselves above the groups that constitute them.
• Recognize that because social structures such as capitalism and socialism are ways of coexisting as humans, changing such macrostructures is, in large part, a matter of changing microrelations and that culture and its effects on habitus formation play key roles in this.
• Acknowledge that new forms “become reality only in the act of being realized” (Landauer, 1911/1978, p. 138 in Day, 2004). The enactment of change, of providing ourselves and our communities with new realities alongside other forms of the self and other communities, is, as Day says, “intersubjective and deeply ethical” (p. 740).
• Embrace the “logic of affinity” that arises out of a rejection of hegemony in “its dual (Gramscian) form” (p. 740). For Day, this requires looking for alternatives to “state and corporate forms of organization” (p. 741). It means rejecting the view of society as constructed by domination over others by government or big business. It also involves a rejection of large-scale persuasion or advocacy attempts. Instead, it will proceed with action, producing alternative forms of music education practice that work alongside current practices.
• Advance through “disengagement and reconstruction rather than by reform or revolution”—the goal being not to produce a “new knowable totality (counter-hegemony)” (p. 740) but to enable experiments and the rise of new ways of being musically, pedagogically, and socially.
• Investigate the relationships among these newly formed actors in the hope of creating new types of musical community (p. 740).

Perhaps such modes of popular music education will produce for us what Day terms a new “uncommon” sense.

As he observes of independent media centers, “this is precisely what is being done through the use of tactics that not only prefigure non-hegemonic alternatives to state and corporate forms, but also create them here and now” (p. 731). Are there now, or might there be in the future, popular music education equivalents? If so, what are or might they be? Is Musical Futures one such example? What about Little Kids Rock?